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From: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: formatting to memory
Message-ID: <1991Feb18.173124.12994@convex.com>
Date: 18 Feb 91 17:31:24 GMT
References: <1991Feb18.171601.1847@agate.berkeley.edu>
Sender: news@convex.com (news access account)
Reply-To: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
Organization: CONVEX Software Development, Richardson, TX
Lines: 21
Nntp-Posting-Host: pixel.convex.com

From the keyboard of raymond@math.berkeley.edu (Raymond Chen):
:I'd find it useful to be able to save the output of a write() into a
:variable rather than sending it to the output channel.  
...
:I wonder whether anybody else has wished for this facility.

Yes, this would fix my trailing newline problem.

    chop($foo = swrite(fmt));

One snag I can foresee is that formats are bounds to filehandles.  Maybe
swrite() should just take an unadorned format name (or indirect one
through a scalar).

I see on Larry's wishlist to make format pictures niftier; besides
animation :-), what else can we come up with?

--tom
--
Tom Christiansen		tchrist@convex.com	convex!tchrist
 "All things are possible, but not all expedient."  (in life, UNIX, and perl)